How Shopify Merchants can Measure Retention

To help our merchants, Shopify set upon tackling the nontrivial problem of helping our merchants determine customer retention.

When a customer stops buying from a business, we call that churn. In a contractual business (like software as a service), it’s easy to see when a customer leaves because they dissolve their contract. By comparison, in a non-contractual business (like a clothing store), it’s more difficult as the customer simply stops purchasing without any direct notification...